A brief history of Microsoft’s e-reader efforts

Although Microsoft invested $300 million in a Barnes & Noble spin-off on Monday, this isn’t the first time Microsoft played the e-book game. Typical for the company, it often has great ideas, but it errs on the timing. In fact, when Microsoft debuted its Windows Pocket PC platform for mobile devices — a precursor to today’s smartphones –back on April 19, 2000, Microsoft Reader was embedded in the platform, allowing you to read e-books on the go.

I owned several Pocket PC devices, as well as the later Windows Mobile ones that followed, and I recall reading hundreds of titles on my handhelds long before modern e-book readers arrived. Microsoft developed its own format called .LIT, which was a HTML-based format similar to that used for Microsoft Windows Help files. And like most of the e-books sold today, Microsoft allowed for DRM, or Digital Rights Management, for device registration — sometimes problematic — and content protection.

Microsoft eventually offered its Microsoft Reader application for its desktop operating systems, starting with Windows 95 support later in 2000. Eventually, all Windows versions save Windows 7 gained the e-reader application. Another fond memory of my Microsoft e-reader experience comes from the Windows Tablet Edition platform: Using a convertible notebook with digital pen support, I could read on a larger screen and take notes. Sound familiar?

Clearly, the PC route as an e-book strategy has limited upside compared to more pocketable devices such as Kindles, Nooks and smartphones. Just as books are meant to be carried and read, reading on a portable screen is the e-book recipe for success today. One legacy feature of Reader, however, still remains as part of Windows: ClearType. The display function that can add clarity through software (via sub-pixel rendering) debuted in the Reader software and later migrated to Microsoft Windows.

The details on how Microsoft’s new partnership with Barnes & Noble may be sketchy just yet, but Microsoft has a clear history in this space, with a dozen years of experience. Again, the ideas Microsoft had with its Reader platform were solid, but the market for e-books didn’t arrive for mainstream consumers until much later. Perhaps the company can take a page out of its history and gain back some of the e-book momentum it lost in the last decade.

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